Managed service provider Easynet has launched a new European cloud portfolio, featuring a “hybrid by design” format in response to customer demand.
The new solution avoids vendor lock-in by offering customers the opportunity to select the most appropriate cloud solution for their requirements, and offers a 99.99% SLA.
Philip Grannum, managing director of cloud, hosting and UC services at Easynet, told CloudTech that even though customers felt the need to switch between vendors as and when, they still needed to buy in to Easynet’s ethos.
“The key to our customers is that they see the benefits of moving to an organisation such as Easynet, and most of that is due to the extra service they get over and above the technology per se,” he said.
“But they also see the benefits of working with the likes of Amazon and Azure – Azure seems to be very compelling right now with our customers – and what they’re looking for is a solution that enables them to do both.”
Easynet describes its ‘hybrid by design’ cloud as a series of multiple public cloud offerings integrated with the Easynet Enterprise cloud. Grannum sees the trend of organisations using a mix of on-premise and cloud as “only going in one direction.”
“I think the market will move towards SaaS providers, but where it is mission critical and business critical, customers will want to have the ability to know that it’s housed in the UK, or housed in France, or Amsterdam,” said Grannum.
“They want to mix and match their key applications with the right cloud for them. Sometimes that’s going to be an on-premise solution if they want really high performance from a database point of view, and other times it’ll be using an enterprise cloud like us,” he added.
Easynet’s 99.99% SLA for single site enterprise cloud services – described as “unique in the European market” according to the press bumf – seems a fair reflection on the possibilities of downtime.
The service hasn’t gone down yet, but Grannum feels the 100% SLA claim is “misleading.”
“From an engineering point of view, I like to stick with that as a base principle,” he said, adding: “You do have failures and that’s why it rounds up to 100 rather than being 100%. We’ve got large enterprise customers, we serve mission critical applications, we know that if the service goes down customers fail, so we always aspire for 100%.”
The European cloud platforms are located in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Milan and Madrid. Easynet’s strategy differs from other vendors in that it collaborates and integrates with like-minded companies, rather than building up data centres around the globe.
The de rigeur location for a data centre is Hong Kong, with SoftLayer and Interoute setting up shop there in recent months. Yet Grannum disagrees.
“You can guarantee that if we built a platform in Hong Kong the next customer will want one in Singapore,” he argued.
“So our solution is to integrate with similar organisations to ourselves, the sort of organisations that take service exceptionally seriously, and have local support staff, as that’s a key part of our proposition,” he added.